Timo Arnall

Design Engaged 2005

20 November 2005 – 22:04

Here are my raw notes from the three days of excellent conversation, urban exploration and brainstorming of Design Engaged 2005.

By Timo | Posted in Conferences, Interaction design, Place, Travel, Ubicomp | Comments (0)

Over Easter I sketched out some ideas for navigating music on a portable player. I was frustrated with the iPod clickwheel, thinking about reducing the reliance on visual interfaces and how navigating music has a lot to do with language. I wanted to explore richer interfaces that combine movement, language and vision.

I too have ditched my large iPod for the iPod Shuffle, finding that I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. But that doesn’t exclude the need for a better small-screen-based music experience.

The pseudo-analogue interface of the iPod clickwheel doesn’t cut it. It can be difficult to control when accessing huge alphabetically ordered lists, and the acceleration or inertia of the view can be really frustrating. The combinations of interactions: clicking into deeper lists, scrolling, clicking deeper, turn into long and tortuous experiences if you are engaged in any simultaneous activity. Plus its difficult to use through clothing, or with gloves.

Music and language

My first thought was something Jack and I discussed a long time ago, using a phone keypad to type the first few letters of a artist, album or genre and seeing the results in real-time, much like iTunes does on a desktop. I find myself using this a lot in iTunes rather than browsing lists.

Predictive text input would be very effective here, when limited to the dictionary of your own music library. (I wonder if QIX search would do this for a music library on a mobile?)

Maybe now is the time to look at this as we see mobile phone music convergence.

h3. Navigating through movement

Since scrolling is inevitable to some degree, even within fine search results, what about using simple movement or tilt to control the search results? One of the problems with using movement for input is context: when is movement intended? And when is movement the result of walking or a bump in the road?

One solution could be a “squeeze and shake” quasi-mode: squeezing the device puts it into a receptive state.

Another could be more reliance on the 3 axes of tilt, which are less sensitive to larger movements of walking or transport.

Gestures

I’m not sure about gestural interfaces, most of the prototypes I have seen are difficult to learn, and require a certain level of performativity that I’m not sure everyone wants to be doing in public space. But having accelerometers inside these devices should, and would, allow for the hacking together other personal, adaptive gestural interfaces that would perhaps access higher level functions of the device.

One gesture I think could be simple and effective would be covering the ear to switch tracks. To try this out we could add a light or capacitive touch sensor to each earbud.

With this I think we would have trouble with interference from other objects, like resting the head against a wall. But there’s something nicely personal and intimate about putting the hand next to the ear, as if to listen more intently.

More knobs

Things that are truly analogue, like volume and time, should be mapped to analogue controls. I think one of the greatest unexplored areas in digital music is real-time audio-scrubbing, currently not well supported on any device, probably because of technical constraints. But scrubbing through an entire album, with a directly mapped input, would be a great way of finding the track you wanted.

Research projects like the DJammer are starting to look at this, specifically for DJs. But since music is inherently time-based there is more work to be done here for everyday players and devices. Let’s skip the interaction design habits we’ve learnt from the CD era and go back to vinyl :)

Evolution of the display

Where displays are required, I hope we can be free of small, fuzzy, low-contrast LCDs. With new displays being printable on paper, textiles and other surfaces there’s the possibility of improving the usability, readability and “glanceability” of the display.

We are beginning to see signs of this with this OLED display on this Sony Network Walkman where the display is under the surface of the product material, without a separate “glass” area.

For the white surface of an iPod, the high-contrast, paper-like surfaces of technologies like e-ink would make great, highly readable displays.

Prototyping

So I really need to get prototyping with accelerometers and display technologies, to understand simple movement and gesture in navigating music libraries. There are other questions to answer: I’m wondering if using movement to scroll through search results would create the appearance of a large screen space, through the lens of a small screen. As with bumptunes, I think many more opportunities will emerge as we make these things.

Tangible and social interaction

18 March 2005 – 12:40

On the 12th January 2005 I gave two lectures here in Oslo on the theme of tangible and social interaction. The presentation is a 1.9mb pdf, and my notes are below. I’m posting this in response to Matt Jones’ and Chris Heathcote’s presentation at ETech (notes), which covers a lot of the same ground.

Brief history of interaction

(Based on Dourish, see reading recommendations, below)

Each successive development in computer history has made greater use of human skills:

electrical: required a thorough understanding of electrical design
symbolic: required a thorough understanding of the manipulation of abstract languages
textual: text dialogue with the computer: set the standards of interaction we still we live with today

graphic: graphical dialogue with the computer, using our spatial skills, pattern recognition, and motion memory with a mouse and keyboard
We have become stuck in this last model.

Interaction with computers has remained largely the same: desk, screen, input devices, etc. Even entirely new fields like mobile and iTV have followed these interaction patterns.

Definitions:
Tangible: physical: having substance or material existence; perceptible to the senses

Social: human and collaborative abilities, or ‘software that’s better because there’s people there’ (Definition from Matt Jones and Matt Webb)
Examples

Dourish notes in the first few chapters of his book that as interaction with computers moves out into the world, it becomes part of our social world too. The social and the tangible are intricately linked as part of “being in the world”.

What follows are examples of products or services we can use or buy right now. I’m specifically interested in the ways that these theories of ubiquitous computing and tangible interaction are moving out into the world, and the way that we can see the trends in currently available products.

I’m aware that there are also terrifically interesting things happening in research (eg the Tangible Media Group) but right now I’m interested in the emergent things that start to happen effects of millions of people using things (like Flickr, weblogs, Nintendo DS, and mobile social software).

Social trends on the web

On the web the current trend is building simple platforms that support complex social/human behaviour
Weblogs, newsreaders and RSS: simple platform that has changed the way the web works, and supported simple social interaction (the basic building blocks of dialogue, or conversation)
Flickr: a simple platform for media/photo sharing: turned into a thriving community: works well with the web by allowing syndicated photos, bases the social network on top of a defined funciton

Others include del.icio.us, world of warcraft, etc.
Social mobile computing

On mobile platforms most of the exciting stuff is happening around presence, context and location
Familiar strangers: stores a list of all the phones that you have been near in places that you inhabit, and then visualises the space around you according to who you have met before. More mobile social software

Mogi: location based game, but most interestingly supports different contexts of use: both at home in front of a big screen, and out on a small mobile screen.
Social games

Interesting that games are moving away from pure immersive 3D worlds, and starting to devote equal attention to their situated, social context
Nintendo DS: PictoChat, local wireless networks that can be adapted for gameplay or communication (picture chatting included as standard)
Sissyfight: very simple social game structure, encourages human behaviour, insults
Habbohotel: simple interaction structures, (and fantastic attention to detail in iconic representations) support human desires. Now a very large company, in over 12 countries, based on the sales of virtual furniture

Singstar: entirely social game, about breaking social barriers and mutual humiliation: realtime analysis/visualisation of your voice actually makes you sing worse!
Tangible games
Eyetoy: Brings the viewer into the screen, creates a performative and social space, and allows communication via PS2
Dance Dance Revolution: taking the television into physical space
Nokia wave-messaging: puts information back into space, and creates social and performative opportunities (Photo thanks to Matt Webb)

Yellow Arrow: puts digital information into city space, gives us a glimpse of the way that we might have more interaction with situated information in the future
There are also very interesting aspects of gender in all of this: this move towards the social implies a move towards the type of games/play that is seen more often in girls.

Recommended reading

Where the Action Is, Paul Dourish (Read the first 3 chapters for a great introduction)

Digital Ground, Malcolm McCullough (Exploring the relationship between architectural and digital spaces)

Physical Computing, O�Sullivan, Igoe (Practical book on making physical computing devices)

Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold (Exploring wider social aspects of mobile technology)

The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin (Covers screen based interaction, but has the best discussion on ‘modes’ of any book)

Mind Hacks, Matt Webb and Tom Stafford (Looks at our interaction with the world from the perspective of neuroscience, great introduction to ‘affordances’)